Selfiehood : Singularity, Celebrity and the Enlightenment

This is a repository copy of Selfiehood : singularity, celebrity and the enlightenment. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/114899/ Version: Accepted Version Article: West, S.C. orcid.org/0000-0003-4990-5495 (2017) Selfiehood : singularity, celebrity and the enlightenment. Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, 47 (2018). pp. 109-130. ISSN 0360-2370 Copyright © 2018 American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. This article first appeared in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 47 (2018), pp.109-130. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ SelehoodSingularityCelebrity andtheEnlightenment! ! SHEARERWEST I am a member of the international Re-Enlightenment network: a collection of eighteenth-century scholars from a variety of disciplines who have been meeting for intellectual exchange for a number of years.2 We debate vociferously about the ways in which the Enlightenment can help us understand our contemporary knowledge economy and digitally connected world, and conversely, how our present day global challenges can deepen our understanding of the history and culture of the Enlightenment. I would précis our mission as follows: to ask present-centered questions of the past without doing violence to our historical sources. To consider current global challenges through an Enlightenment lens is never less than illuminating, and this method evokes Jo Roach’s view of the “deep eighteenth century” (as opposed to the “long” or “wide” eighteenth century)—a century, as he puts it, “that isn’t over yet”.3 Here I am treading on territory that has a powerful legacy in the manner in which Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in 1947 interpreted the authoritarianism and hyper-empiricism of the Nazi regime as the culmination of the Enlightenment project.4 While their uncompromising view of the Enlightenment has been rightly deconstructed, it opened up a new way of thinking about the workings of mass culture and totalitarianism in the 20th century. The subject of this essay is quite different from theirs, though it draws on a comparable consideration of Enlightenment legacy. ! WEST I will probe a 21st- century narcissistic obsession with the self and images of the self by looking back to a deining! period in late eighteenth-century England when “selfhood” became examined, popularized and visually presented in new ways. The narcissistic phenomenon that triggered my historical investigation was identiied by Christopher Lasch in the 1970s as characterized by: “the fascination with fame and celebrity, the fear of competition, the inability to suspend disbelief, the shallowness and transitory quality of personal relations”.5 While these factors retain their resonance, more recent concerns about freedom of speech, safe spaces and micro aggressions are uncomfortably aligned to self-obsession, narcissism, solipsism and body dysmorphism.6 As a portraiture specialist, I am particularly interested in the ways in which self-obsession inds its way into images, especially the mass media attention given to people taking photographs of themselves.7 Not only are global media and social media inundated with these images, but quite often we are looking at photographs of people taking selies, rather than the selies themselves.8 However, while anyone and everyone today can make an image of themselves, the purveyors of “selies” before the 21st century were primarily artists, a subject that I relect on below. Travelling from our present-day “seliehood” to the past, many scholars have demonstrated how the Enlightenment represented a period in which there was a new attention to individual and personal identity. New technologies and spaces of dissemination and socialization opened up a growing concern with the self, individuality, singularity and the social performance of what we would now call personality within a nascent celebrity culture. I am going to explore the way in which this cultural shift can be understood in its own terms, the growing fascination with singularity and eccentricity at the end of the eighteenth century, the contribution of portraiture to changes in social attitudes to the self, and the relationship of these changes to a deep-rooted English political commitment to liberty. The last decades of the eighteenth century experienced a constellation of new developments in social life, philosophy and visual culture that together foregrounded more frequently the singular traits of individuals.9 These new tendencies were opposed to earlier generic categorizations that searched for broad classiications of social types, modelled loosely on Theophrastus.10 The changes that took place in conceptions of identity and self have been characterized by a number of scholars in slightly different ways; however most agree that perceived stability of character was accompanied by an emphasis on interiority and the distinctiveness of individual “personalities”.11 This was of course a phenomenon that predated the eighteenth century. Charles Taylor, in his magisterial work of moral philosophy, Sources of the SelehoodCelebritySingularityandtheEnlightenment Self, traced this history back to the Middle Ages, even though he recognized that the eighteenth century, with what he referred to as: “the valuation of commerce…the rise of the novel…the changing understanding of marriage and the family, and…the new importance of sentiment” represented an acceleration of this tendency.12 Frederick Rider, in his study of Montaigne, claimed that the conception of individuals as divided into subject and object, and the self-consciousness that accompanied this, developed in the Renaissance and was augmented by self-objectiication, or as he put it: “the distance between an individual and an image of himself that he externalizes through the medium of written words or paint.”13 While the birth of selfhood can be discovered in whatever period of history we like, there is little doubt that the latter decades of the eighteenth century saw some signiicant developments in the way in which people thought about individuals and the self. Among these developments was the popularity of Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy; a rage from the late 1780s for eccentric magazines and other biographical and visual collections of strange, outré or extraordinary individuals; the growth of a celebrity culture that fueled a prurient attention to the details of the private character of public igures, and the Royal Academy exhibitions and the proliferation of print shops in London. In each of these instances, a fascination with variety of human character went hand-in-hand with portraiture as a means of expressing that variety. Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente irst appeared in German in 1775–8 and in 1792 was translated by Henry Hunter into English and dedicated to Lavater’s friend and fellow Swiss, the artist, Henri Fuseli. Lavater saw physiognomy as “the talent of discovering the interior of Man by his exterior”, and his three-volume work was predicated on an argument that there was an ininite variety of human character.14 He was heavily reliant on portraiture as a tool by which to test his pseudo-scientiic theory. The English edition of Lavater therefore had over 800 engravings, many of them portraits, a number of which were supplied by Fuseli. Lavater tackled the concept of portraiture directly: “What is the art of Portrait painting? It is the representation of a real individual, or part of his body only; it is the reproduction of an image; it is the art of presenting, on the irst glance of an eye, the form of a man by traits, which it would be impossible to convey by words.”15 Coming as he did from a strong Zwinglian perspective, Lavater’s essays were necessarily colored by a fascination with the soul and the ways in which the workings of the soul showed itself in the human countenance. His admirers and critics recognized this moral dimension to his work. Gottfried Lessing called his project “moral semiotics”, while The World in 1790 referred to him (inaccurately) as a “German Divine” and compared his theology to Methodism.16 WEST Though largely predicated on the idea of ininite variety in human nature, Lavater’s theory of physiognomy projected! an aura of objectivity—of examining the faces of others in order to spy on their soul. However, he also published other writings, which suggested that self-examination was as prominent as this voyeuristic aspect of his philosophy. His Aphorisms and most notably, his Secret Journal of a Self-Observer— both of which were translated into English in the 1790s—in some ways echo the more secular perspective of Rousseau, who wrote in his Confessions: “I know my heart, and have studied mankind: I am not made like any one I have been acquainted with, perhaps like no one in existence.”17 Lavater’s Secret

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